Thursday, March 13, 2008

Google Office in Zurich

If your ideal workspace includes a slide, a games room, a 'chill-out' aquarium and plenty of free food then you had better get your CV into Google.

Dotcom companies were defined by beanbags and pizza but Google, a company that came to prominence after the bubble had burst, has taken that image to a whole new level.

Meeting 'pods' in the style of Swiss chalets and igloos, fireman poles to allow easy access between floors and a slide to ensure that people can get to the cafeteria as quickly as possible are all part of a design of its new European engineering headquarters in Zurich Switzerland.

The building was designed for - and partly by - the 300 engineers who will work there. Full story.
































Source

Actual Picture of the Spiral Galaxy M104 Looks Like a Painting




From NASA:

The striking spiral galaxy M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile featuring a broad ring of obscuring dust. Seen in silhouette against a bright bulge of stars, the swath of cosmic dust lanes lends a hat-like appearance to the galaxy in optical images suggesting the more popular moniker, The Sombrero Galaxy. Here, Hubble Space Telescope archival image data has been reprocessed to create this alternative look at the well-known galaxy. The newly developed processing improves the visibility of details otherwise lost in overwhelming glare, in this case allowing features of the galaxy's dust lanes to be followed well into the bright central region. About 50,000 light-years across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Spectacular New Building Projects in Dubai

Shuffle Tower (Scheduled for Completion in 2009)
















DU Tower (Scheduled for Completion in 2010)









Link


World's Longest & Tallest Arch Bridge (Completion in 2012)





Here's some info on the bridge as envisioned by New York architecture firm Fxfowle:

- It's one mile long and 670 feet tall.
- It will have 12 lanes for traffic.
- It will cost 817 million dollars.
- The design has Sheikh Mohammed's official stamp of approval.
- The bridge will carry more than 2,000 vehicles per hour in each direction.
- A metro line will run across the middle.
- Construction begins in March, with a slated completion date of 2012.

Images by Fxfowle

Link